Sylvia Plath

Death entered Sylvia Plath’s life early with the death of her father when she was only eight years old. If that had not been catastrophic enough, then the way in which she had to deal with that death was even more detrimental. Plath’s mother kept her from her father’s funeral. She never allowed her children to know how to grieve by suppressing her own grief.
These events in Sylvia’s childhood helped fuel her obsession with death in her poems. The poem “Edge” (1963) expresses death in the traditional style of pain, bereavement and the sense of separation that we have with the dead. On the other hand, the poem “Death & Co.” (1962) presents the theme of death in a “joking, slangy death figure”, and yet the poem loses nothing of it’s terror compared to “Edge”. It is interesting to see how these two poems, which are so different in style and tone, can accomplish the same message; the message that death, although terrorising, is not feared by her, that she is not ...